Middle East expert Professor Moshe Sharon told Arutz Sheva on Sunday that, 10 years after the “Disengagement” from Gush Katif, Israeli leaders still have not learned a lesson.
“It is obvious that the expulsion from Gush Katif was a very bad mistake, and I do not want to use harsher words. The mistake is not only because we abandoned the security of the State of Israel as a result of the expulsion of Jews and abandoned the control that we had on this area by the IDF," he said.
"Once we left Gush Katif we gave the whole region to Hamas and gave them a free hand to act against us. Not only did Hamas humiliate the people of Israel when it burned synagogues, we also brought hundreds of thousands of civilians under the threat of terrorism,” added Sharon.
"The expulsion itself led to the creation of a Palestinian state in Gaza which we are trying every day to defend against," he said. “Anyone who speaks of another Palestinian state [in Judea and Samaria] is actually speaking about two states for Palestinians and another Palestinian state in Jordan. This would lead to the Palestinians having three political bodies, one of which we brought about ourselves when we left Gush Katif.”
Sharon refuted the claim made by some of the supporters of the Disengagement, who argued that had there been a binding agreement between the two sides there would not have been terror coming from Gaza.
“It's very easy to say the word 'if'. The word 'if' does not exist in history,” he said. “There was no agreement. We simply took Jews and expelled them and destroyed flourishing communities.”
"Israeli leaders have not learned their lesson," stressed Sharon, "just like they have not learned the lesson from the Oslo Accords. Oslo has brought upon us more than 1,500 deaths and to this day the trouble of the Oslo disaster continues. To date, the Gush Katif expellees continue to suffer from economic and psychologigal problems, and yet I still hear the media asking whether it is possible to have another expulsion in Judea and Samaria. If there is something that the media and politicians have not learned, it is the lessons of the expulsion, and yet the journalists have the chutzpah to ask whether it is possible to expel more Jews for nothing.”
Sharon continued, "Unfortunately, it's not only the media but also the politicians, and not just the ones on the left, but also politicians who supposedly love the land of Israel. We learn from history that those are the biggest expellers, and I do not understand what the purpose of that is. If their goal is it to achieve peace then they are mistaken; expulsions increase the appetite of the other side and only achieve the killing of Jews.”